The Next Generation of Batteries Could Be Built by Viruses

Belcher had used viruses to assemble a lithium-ion battery’s positive and negative electrodes, an engineering breakthrough that promised to reduce the toxicity of the battery manufacturing process and boost their performance. Yet as Belcher demonstrated, these qualities could be adopted for nanoengineering to produce batteries that have improved energy density, lifetime, and charging rates that can be produced in an eco-friendly way.“There has been growing interest in the battery field to explore materials in nanostructure form for battery electrodes,” says Konstantinos Gerasopoulos, a senior research scientist who works on advanced batteries at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. The abalone never got around to building batteries, but Belcher realized this same fundamental process could be implemented in viruses to build useful materials for humans.“We’ve been engineering biology to control nanomaterials that are not normally grown biologically,” Belcher says. In principle, he says, viral assembly can be used to significantly improve the structure of battery electrodes and boost their charging rates.So far Belcher’s virally-assembled electrodes have had an essentially random structure, but she and her colleagues are working on coaxing the viruses into more ordered arrangements. All Belcher needs are the electrode materials, room temperature water, and some genetically-engineered viruses.“Something my lab is completely focused on now is trying to get the cleanest technology,” Belcher says. At one point, Belcher was also using viruses to assemble solar cells, but the technology wasn’t efficient enough to compete with new perovskite solar cells.Whether the viral assembly of battery electrodes can scale to the levels needed for commercial production remains an open question.